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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#151

Post by quadrifoliate »

schwartzworld wrote: post #125
dragandj wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used. That is the point. If it worked the same as every editor you've used, why switch? The point why Emacs is better is because it's different. These things need to be learned. Otherwise, Emacs can't help you. It would be like people complaining that playing a guitar is different than pushing the play butt…

Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them. I spent weeks trying to switch, but ultimately I found the experience frustrating. UIs follow the same patterns for a reason, it makes it easier for users to adopt the tech. The biggest draw for me was org-mode with org-babel. I've never seen anything else like it

> Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them.

I find this difficult to understand for people who use the terminal. The keybindings are the exact same for most terminals by default, since they use readline. Want to go to the end of your command? `Ctrl-E`. Want to go to the beginning? `Ctrl-A`. Want to search backwards through history? `Ctrl-R` (same thing you would do while searching backwards through an Emacs buffer).

All of these also happen to work everywhere in MacOS. Put your cursor on the URL and press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#152

Post by oblio »

gnulinux wrote: post #137
oblio wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally known 2 Emacs users in my ~15 years in the industry. I've worked in Europe for various startups and a bunch of corporations. Both of them used it as a sort of hobby/side editor, their main money maker was an IDE (VS, IntelliJ). I've probably worked with 500 developers, if not more. My personal impression is that Emacs is like the Yeti of programming editors. Everybody has heard about it, few claim to…

This is amazing. I already wrote this to another comment, but quoting myself: > Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current cowo…

Isn't Boston where MIT is and where Stallman lives?

Also, Berkeley as in BSD.

You're probably living in a smaller bubble than mine :-)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#153

Post by pritovido »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #81
Miraste wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…

Meanwhile, I’m always amazed how, on HN threads about Emacs, people talk about preferring the Vi family of editors. When I installed Linux on my computer two decades ago and had to learn *nix, my own (totally subjective) impression was that the Vi family was regarded as clunky and half-obsolete, about as much of a pain as editing in ed. As I began to contribute to the Free Software community, most of the other people…

When I entered a technical University in Spain, all the masters(teachers that have done incredible things on their lives) used either Vim or Emacs.

Most "normal" people just used other "more visual" editors.

As I learned from the masters I started using more and more both vim for unix tasks and programming and emacs for lisp. Now I use 65%vim, 30% emacs, 5% other editors.

Both of those editors are extremely powerful. But you need to know how to use them. It is not painful for the master to use them, in fact it is automatic and instantaneous and faster than any other editor, a thought becomes an action without conscious intervention, like you thing in playing Do minor in an instrument and your fingers do it automatically, you want to erase a line or replace a word, you think on it, is done.

They are like musical instruments. You could have the best piano or violin in the world, if a mediocre player plays them, you get bad sound.

Most people would be better served with a simple electronic piano or a tablet with lights that point to the next notes of the song, and auto correct them when they play a bad note.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#154

Post by tsuujin »

dragandj wrote: post #145
acqq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I never understood -- I've implemented exactly this "which editor emulation do you want to use" and "edit your own bindings" for one Windows product containing editor in early nineties. It wasn't hard. The default was, of course, the "least surprising" for the platform, but it also allowed other popular editors then. If there's anything that can reduce friction to the new user, it's that: a beginner can…

In Emacs, you can configure literally anything, including the keybindings . Some people use Emacs with Vim keybindings (Evil, Spacemacs, Doom). Now, for me, typical Emacs keybindings, of which the majority is defined in 3rd party packages are very logical, while Vim's are not. But the users who prefer the Vim way did they work and configured Emacs however they liked. OTOH, of the million people who complain and ask f…

Probably because having the default be something other than what a user is used to is not going to compel them towards doing the research to fix it.

In order to get cua-mode working in emacs, you first have to know that it exists. I didn't know it existed for like two years of daily emacs usage, I just can't find it in myself to expect someone to know about it after 10 minutes.

By the time you know it exists, you've already accepted the keybindings and you've already put in the time to build some muscle memory, and it doesn't seem as important anymore.

The fact that some people get past it isn't really an indicator that it isn't a huge friction point.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#155

Post by konjin »

zarkov99 wrote: post #93
mapgrep wrote: post #28

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…

It's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a generation.

When you've been warned the world will end and ~~notepad~~ VS code will take over for 50 years you tend to become blase about the whole thing.

Emacs has a steep learning curve and that's good. You need a moat to keep the barbarians from destroying your kingdom.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#156

Post by konjin »

zarkov99 wrote: post #102
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Emacs for 33 of those 40+ years, and I agree with that until the word "without". You don't mean "modernization". You mean "without it changing". And the answer is yes, it will die out.

What are some of the changes you would want to see?

Proper multithreading/tasking.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#157

Post by baby »

All of these are missing the point imo. The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins and functionalities. Everything is a menu away, and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts. This whole process just doesn’t exist in emacs. To get a plugin, it’s a huge step (setting up custom elisp to get melpa) and then it’s a huge learning curve just to try a plugin.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#158

Post by onedognight »

dragandj wrote: post #121
flowerlad wrote: post #30

I have been an Emacs user for 20+ years, and I don't use editors that can't be configured to use Emacs key bindings. Luckily IDEs like Visual Studio can be configured to mimic Emacs. To me the issues that make Emacs not modern are: (1) Slow startup. (2) Buggy language modes. (The ones that come with it are good, but third party ones such as web-mode are buggy.) and (3) No intellisense out of the box.

For the first point, use emacs service + emacsclient. Starts instantly.

This and avoiding require in your .emacs. When packages are autoloaded on demand emacs starts up quickly. As a quick test try emacs -q” to see if something in your .emacs is the cause of the slowdown.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#159

Post by MinusGix »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #151
schwartzworld wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them. I spent weeks trying to switch, but ultimately I found the experience frustrating. UIs follow the same patterns for a reason, it makes it easier for users to adopt the tech. The biggest draw for me was org-mode with org-babel. I've never seen anything else like it

> Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them. I find this difficult to understand for people who use the terminal. The keybindings are the exact same for most terminals by default, since they use readline. Want to go to the end of your command? `Ctrl-E`. Want to go to the beginning? `Ctrl-A`. Want to search backwards through history? `Ctrl-R` (same thing you would do while searching bac…

Personally, out of those I've only used Ctrl-R in the terminal. I just use the Home/End keys to navigate to the start/end of lines. I was actually surprised to read that Ctrl-E and Ctrl-A would do that. I usually expect Ctrl-A to select all, and don't really expect anything from Ctrl-E. (Though, I'd be surprised if home/end didn't work in Emacs, I'm just saying I've never used those readline keybinds).
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